For the past many years (I've lost track by now; since 2008 or 2009 maybe?) I have hosted SkyLords out of my bedroom or home office to save on costs. However - I believe it is now time to use some of the generous user's donations on hosting, which should improve our uptime from 97% or so (when I lose power or internet at home) to 99.9% or better. I will continue running a home server for the forseeable future, and so will be able to fall back to it if anything goes wrong - but I expect this will be a sustainable long term solution for SkyLords.

However, this migration does mean something we none of us enjoy: temporary downtime as we wait for the DNS to update. I'll make the move in roughly 45-48 hours from now. Aside from DNS updates, total downtime due to stopping the game and transferring the database should be less than an hour (probably 30 minutes), while the DNS update should take about 30 minutes as well (I'll start the update while transferring the database). A very few users with poorly behaved ISPs might have some issues for up to a week; I'll flush the opendns.com cache just in case for those hypothetical individuals.

One final note - I have a few different areas in the world I might host the server, which will probably impact nightly and round scripts (midnight will change), and have a small impact on ping times. As SkyLords was originally programmed and hosted in Europe, I am considering putting it in London. On the other hand, a quick scan active players (logged in in past 4 weeks) indicates that only slightly more than a third would benefit from European hosting, so I might put it in New Jersey instead (should have slightly better latency on the whole). I am currently leaning most towards New Jersey.

I wouldn't mind it being hosted in Europe or Jersey, might make it easier to do things at round end for me since I don't stay up till midnight very often anymore. Though either one might make aliens a little less convenient, for me at least- would be nice if they were 4 random times a day to make it more necessary to watch news... or have a news watcher I guess.

Ended up leaving the TZ as-is for now (America/Denver) - I'd forgotten that was pretty much entirely software defined. Can change it, but should wait till the start of next round . How'd y'all feel about just sticking it at UTC?